Alliterative Revival Research Articles

'Rum, ram, ruf' Riders: A Review of Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival

'Rum, ram, ruf' Riders: A Review of Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival

Dating “Sweet Desire”

Abstract C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien are two key figures in the Modern Alliterative Revival, and each sought to revive Old English poetics with close to absolute metrical fidelity. While scholarship on Tolkien’s alliterative verse has seen an uptick in recent years, though, Lewis remains the odd poet out. Nominally, this article attempts to assign a composition date for Lewis’s poem “Sweet Desire.” My dating to early 1930 associates this text with Lewis’s famous conversion to theism. More broadly, this article tracks one revivalist’s painstaking adaptation of the alliterative meter into Modern English, outlining the technical challenges faced by Lewis and which other contemporary revivalists must overcome as well.

Carved in Granite: C.S. Lewis’s Revivalism in The Nameless Isle

The alliterative poetics used by C.S. Lewis have often proved a critical challenge for scholars without the right kind of medievalist training. In Lewis’s most ambitious contribution to the Modern Alliterative Revival, The Nameless Isle, I argue that he has a strong interest in maintaining fidelity to the Old English alliterative metre, particularly in regards to Sievers types and hypermetric verses, yet he partakes of several adaptations and concessions to Modern English that makes his narrative romance, in some ways, a more successful model than Tolkien’s contemporary ‘arch-purist’ text, The Fall of Arthur. By and large, while questions about a poet’s faithfulness to a historical alliterative tradition are important, deviations from strict fidelity can be even more important yet – they reveal the specific metrical challenges faced by poets in trying to resurrect the alliterative metre. Only by analysing the metrical data behind a poem like The Nameless Isle can we understand what a revivalist may be specifically trying to accomplish with their revivalism.

Winner and Waster and its Contexts: Chivalry, Law and Economics in Fourteenth-Century England by W. Mark Ormrod

Reviewed by: Winner and Waster and its Contexts: Chivalry, Law and Economics in Fourteenth-Century England by W. Mark Ormrod Jennifer Goodman Wollock w. mark ormrod, Winner and Waster and its Contexts: Chivalry, Law and Economics in Fourteenth-Century England. Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 2021. Pp. xi, 189. isbn: 978-1-84384-581-2. $99. This posthumous book presents a long-term project of the late W. Mark Ormrod (1957–2020), Professor of History at the University of York, one of the preeminent medieval historians of our generation. He should be familiar to Arthurian scholars, for much essential work, especially his magisterial biography of Edward III (Yale, 2012). The present volume was delivered to its publisher shortly before the author's death in August 2020. It is a privilege to review it here. [End Page 108] The fourteenth-century alliterative debate poem Winner and Waster survives in BL Additional MS 31042, one of two collections assembled by Robert Thornton (fl. 1418–56), gentleman of Yorkshire. Winner and Waster resonates with other alliterative Arthurian texts, especially the Alliterative Morte Darthur and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, whose opening lines are notably similar, as well as with Piers Plowman. Its dating and significance challenge its interpreters. It has a good deal of intrinsic charm and deserves to be better known. Professor Ormrod's painstaking account of this puzzling text began in a research seminar discussion and developed into this book, which took form during his retirement. Winner and Waster's theme preoccupies many Arthurian texts. The conflict between the royal virtue of magnificence—conspicuous consumption and largesse, the old 'treasure giving'—and the principle that the king should be a prudent manager of his own assets is ancient. In 'Culhwch and Olwen' Arthur manifests lavish generosity and Cei speaks up for rigor, law and order, gatekeeping, and stricter self-control. The theme resurfaces in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzifal; Wolfram endorses Cei's viewpoint. If there were more Ceis, the courts of thirteenth-century Europe would not contain so much riff-raff. Even Malory's Merlin is dryly critical of Arthur's excessive generosity. Outside of Arthuriana, winners and wasters are a primary theme in Piers Plowman. Under that famous connoisseur Richard II the topic continued to be of great interest. It runs throughout English history, down to the present. Ormrod's study begins by describing Winner and Waster and its manuscript context. It ends with a timeline, a modernized version of the text, bibliography and index. In the introduction to his 'traditionally historicist' study, Ormrod discusses previous efforts to localize the poem. He makes a case for a date in the 1360s—certainly after 1363, rather than earlier or later. Supporting this thesis, Ormrod's central chapters reconsider the poem's references to the Garter Feast of 1358 and English diplomacy during the 1350s and 1360s, the Statute of Treasons of 1352 and royal arbitration, the short-lived sumptuary Laws of 1363, and the royal household and finances under Edward III. Ormrod then reassesses Winner and Waster against other poems of the Alliterative Revival. He rejects established views of the poem as contrasting mercantile and courtly perspectives. Instead, he sees it as a debate involving 'that large portion of the lay elite that participated actively in the early stages of the Hundred Years' War' (p. 15). This project complements existing literary studies. Ormrod focuses on Winner and Waster as a single poem. His expert work sheds light on social, economic, and institutional history, bringing many highly technical elements together. Its analysis of the historical record, decade by decade, illuminates the fourteenth century as a whole. It adds significant contextual information to localize this example of alliterative poetry in relation to late medieval Arthurian literature. I recommend it to my own graduate students, colleagues, and all readers interested in seeing history and literature collaborating effectively with one another. In the race between life and death that we all run, Professor Ormrod continues to guide us in this painstaking, clearly written study, and leaves us, his colleagues, with a gift of great value. This work (to be supplemented by an upcoming volume of essays, and by the concurrent work of other...

Poul Anderson and the American Alliterative Revival

Although Poul Anderson is best known for his prose, he dabbled in poetry all his life, and his historical interests led him to become a major—if unacknowledged— contributor to the twentieth-century alliterative revival. This revival, most often associated with British poets such as W. H. Auden, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis, attempted to adapt medieval Germanic alliterative meter into modern English. Yet Anderson, a firmly libertarian Enlightenment-style writer, imbued his alliterative poetry with a rationalistic spirit that implicitly accepted (with appropriate qualifications) a narrative of historical progress. This article analyzes the alliterative verse that Anderson wrote and uncovers how the demands of the pulp market shaped what poetry he could produce.

Antiquarianism Underground: The Twentieth-century Alliterative Revival in American Genre Poetry

Although alliterative poetry—a medieval Germanic meter based on similar-sounding initial stressed syllables—first flourished in Old English and Old Norse literature, a resurgence of the meter has appeared within the twentieth century. The most famous modern practitioners have been J. R. R. Tolkien, Ezra Pound, and W. H. Auden, but a wholly neglected subset of the alliterative revival involves American genre poets working in fantasy, horror, and science fiction. After the 1954 publications of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword, alliterative genre poetry began to exist "underground" in fanzines like Amra and within the Society for Creative Anachronism. By and large, a sense of semi-scholarly antiquarianism has inspired these poets. Although this revival of alliterative metrics never reached the same "critical mass" of the fourteenth-century alliterative revival, it nonetheless shows how a non-professional antiquarian interest in medieval literature can foment a niche—yet surprisingly robust—body of genre poetry.

Эволюция среднеанглийских аллитерационных сочетаний в шотландской поэзии XV века: новые формы и функции

Alliterative phrases, along with traditional poetic words and substantivized epithets, are considered to be a typical feature of the diction of alliterative revival in England and Scotland, a special marker of this tradition. Formulaic alliterative phrases are quite a different phenomenon than traditional oral poetic formulas; their formulaic character is expressed in potential variation of their elements provided that the semantics and the alliteration scheme are preserved, which allows poets to create individual author variants on the basis of traditional phrases. The paper discusses the use of formulaic alliterative phrases as illustrated by two alliterative Scottish poems that were written nearly at the same time (second half of the 15th century) and belong to the same tradition, but to different genres: the romance Golagros and Gawain and the allegorical poem The Buke of the Howlat. Golagros and Gawain is a poem composed in the decline of the genre of romance, which glorifies the virtues of chivalry and the heroic world becoming a thing of the past. A characteristic feature of the poem is the extensive use of variation between the elements of set phrases typical of the tradition of alliterative revival. A large number of alliterative phrases in Golagros and Gawain are individual author variants describing an ideal chivalric hero. In The Buke of the Howlat, on the contrary, most phrases are fixed and stereotyped. The author of this poem prefers to exploit formulas as a satiric device, putting typical phrases in an unusual context and thus altering their meaning.

‘Thare is na leid on life of lordship hym like’: linguistic means of depicting king arthur in the poem Golagros and Gawain

It has recently been marked that the figure of king Arthur in Scottish literature is rather controversial: on the one hand, Arthur is a noble and valiant knight; on the other hand, he is an arrogant invader whose aim is to conquer the whole world. The contradictory nature of the figure of the legendary king results from the differences between English and Scottish political mythology: in Scotland by the late Middle Ages there had been developed its own legendary history, and the historical myth about Arthur as a king of the whole Britain had been interpreted as a threat to the national sovereignty. The paper focuses on the analysis of linguistic means of depicting king Arthur in one of the two surviving Scottish Arthurian romances, Golagros and Gawain written in the XVth century by an anonymous author. Golagros and Gawain continues the tradition of Middle English alliterative revival in Scotland in a local variety of the English language; the diction and style of this tradition are characterized by the use of substantive epithets, formulas, attributive complexes with alliterating elements. The research has shown that in Golagros and Gawainking Arthur is depicted as an honorable and generous, almost ideal ruler who returns to Golagros the independence he had earlier been deprived of. Kings dignity and nobility are emphasized in the poem with the help of traditional linguistic means of alliterative poetry: the qualities expressed in attributes are repeated several times with variations in poetic formulas and fixed in substantive epithets.

Reconstructing Alliterative Verse: The Pursuit of a Medieval Meter by Ian Cornelius

Reviewed by: Reconstructing Alliterative Verse: The Pursuit of a Medieval Meter by Ian Cornelius Jordan Zweck Ian Cornelius. Reconstructing Alliterative Verse: The Pursuit of a Medieval Meter Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. 234. $99.99. Recent years have seen a flourishing of publications on the subject of medieval English metrics. The Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature series alone has produced, along with Ian Cornelius's Reconstructing Alliterative Verse, books by Geoffrey Russom (2017) and Eric Weiskott (2016) on medieval English alliterative poetry. Like these books, Reconstructing Alliterative Verse operates across a long temporal scale, from the seventh through sixteenth centuries, with occasional forays into comparisons with late antique Latin poetry. And like Weiskott and Russom, Cornelius rejects the idea of the so-called "Alliterative Revival" of the fourteenth century, arguing for a continuous tradition of alliterative meter spanning the English Middle Ages, despite the lack of written evidence of such poetry composed c. 1250–c. 1350. The book asks how alliterative meter arose; how it developed over time; and, finally, why it fell out of favor in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In support of its claims, the book also offers a radical revision of how we theorize alliterative meter. Building on the 2008 dissertation of Nikolay Yakovlev, Cornelius describes a system of Old English alliterative meter constructed not around four stressed syllables per line (as in the Sievers five-type system), but rather around four metrical "positions" per line, which are filled by morphemes. Morphological units are not categorized as stressed and unstressed, but rather "strong" or "weak," depending on the part of speech to which they belong and their position in the line. In Cornelius's example, Beowulf, 54a—"leof leodcyning"—would be scanned according to Yakovlev's morphological system as SSSS, where "S" indicates a strong and "x" a weak position. In more traditional scansion, informed by phonological stress patterns, we would expect leodcyning to have primary stress on leod- and secondary stress on -cyn-, with the suffix -ing unstressed. Yakovlev's theory does away with the distinction between primary and secondary stress in polysyllabic Old English words; positions are strong or not, with no gradations between them. Half lines have a minimum of two strong positions but may have as many as four strong positions, and in some metrical types the number of morphemes in some weak positons can or must be more than one. Yakovlev's system results in eight possible types of meter (61). Stress (or [End Page 458] accent) remains possible in Old English verse (and existed phonologically in the spoken language), but is not the primary determiner of meter. Much of the book's argument about both Old English and Middle English meter relies on the reader accepting Yakovlev's ideas, as presented and retested by Cornelius. Not all will. Yakovlev's theory is gaining interest and attention among metrists—Weiskott and Russom also refer to his work, and it has been reviewed by Thomas Cable—but it is not necessarily widely accepted among early medievalists. Early English medievalists who study vernacular poetry but do not identify as metrists may be surprised to learn of its existence. Reconstructing Alliterative Verse is divided into an introduction, five chapters, and a brief epilogue on Spenser's Shepheardes Calender (1578). Chapter 1 argues that even if an ars poetica for medieval English had survived, we would still need to turn to the poetry itself to recover a full understanding of alliterative verse. Not only does practice always deviate from theorized norms, but also the evidence we have for poetic theory from earlier Latin sources and from medieval Iceland demonstrates that medieval literary theory would not have had the vocabulary to address poetic form sufficiently. This is not a critique of medieval thinkers, but an acknowledgment that poetry is very difficult to write about. As Cornelius notes, "[t]he theorists are still playing catch-up today" (25). Moreover, medieval people did not inherit a useful set of terminology from Latin (or Greek) for alliteration, because alliteration would have functioned differently in English than in Latin and because many authors of Latin treatises either ignored alliteration or saw it as hopelessly old-fashioned. One...

Oral Tradition and the History of English Alliterative Verse

Middle English verse of the so-called Alliterative Revival evinces a pattern of alliteration across the line and a series of rhythmical configurations within the half-line that are reminiscent of t...

3. The Role of Alliteration in the Alliterative Revival : Sir Gawain and Piers Plowman

3. The Role of Alliteration in the Alliterative Revival : Sir Gawain and Piers Plowman

Preface

Preface Kevin J. Harty and Barbara Tepa Lupack Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 2] This special issue of Arthuriana is a festschrift to honor Alan Lupack, one of the most influential, kind, and generous scholars of many things—Arthurian in particular, and medieval in general. And I am privileged to serve as co-editor, with Barbara Tepa Lupack, for these essays and co-facilitator for this special issue that honors someone whom Barbara and I have together known for almost ninety years. Barbara first met Alan as a colleague in the English Department at St. John’s University. They would go on, as everyone knows, to marry, collaborate, support each other, and, most importantly, to become true soul mates. Alan and I first became friends in 1971 as graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania, spending three years together—often in the same seminars—before going our separate ways to begin careers that somehow always allowed us to keep bumping into each other and thereby sustaining our friendship. Along the way, Barbara and I too became fast friends, and together we three have remained friends as well as collaborators—and, sometimes, coconspirators—in the several worlds of Arthuriana and medievalia. Alan took his honors undergraduate degree magna cum laude in English at Fordham University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He then went on to earn an MA in English at New York University before coming to Penn to earn his doctorate, which he completed in 1974 with a dissertation on Structure and Tradition in the Poems of the Alliterative Revival. Alan began his teaching career as a TA at Penn, and, upon earning his doctorate, he became, in succession, an adjunct at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, an instructor at St. John’s University, a senior lecturer in Poland at the University of Wrocław, and an assistant professor at Wayne State College. Upon leaving Wayne State College, Alan began what was to become his life work—his affiliation with the Rossell Hope Robbins Library at the University of Rochester. From 1988 until 2015, he was Director of the Robbins Library and the Koller-Collins Graduate English Center and a member of its board of stewards, while also holding a concurrent appointment as adjunct Professor in the Department of English. Under Alan’s careful direction, the Robbins Library became a welcoming home for scholars from around the globe and a venue for numerous exhibits, conferences, and public presentations that contributed immensely to the vitality [End Page 3] of the greater University’s (and city’s) intellectual life. What also marked his remarkable tenure at Robbins was Alan’s self-effacing interest in helping to produce several new generations of medievalists through the careful and patient mentoring that he provided to graduate students and junior scholars who came to use the invaluable resources of the Robbins collection—a collection which he not only curated but also expanded. While modesty may be one of the hallmarks of Alan’s remarkable scholarly career, his friends and colleagues have not hesitated to recognize and honor his many important contributions to the fields of Arthurian and medieval studies. Alan was awarded the inaugural Norris J. Lacy Prize for Outstanding Editorial Achievement in the Field of Arthurian Studies in 2008, the Lehman Senior Scholar Fellowship at the Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies at the Norman Rockwell Museum in 2014, and the Mythopoeic Society Scholarship Award for the best scholarly book in myth and fantasy studies in 2001 (for King Arthur in America). Alan’s scholarly influence and importance can also be seen in the many editorial positions that he has held. He is, or has been, a member of the Editorial Board for the Palgrave Macmillan monograph series Studies in Arthurian and Courtly Cultures (2004–present), the Associate Editor of TEAMS Middle English Texts (1995–present), a member of the Editorial Board of TEAMS Middle English Texts (1994–1995), a member of the Editorial Board of Arthuriana (1994–present), editor of The Round Table: A Journal of Poetry and Fiction (1984–1999), and editor of the journal of Arthurian studies Avalon to Camelot (1986–1989). Alan is...

The Alliterative Verse of The Fall of Arthur

The Alliterative Verse of The Fall of Arthur T. S. Sudell (bio) 1.0. Introduction In a letter to Tolkien, written on December 9, 1934, R. W. Chambers declared himself convinced that “the Beowulf meter can be used in modern English” (FA 10). The claim is a bold one, though not without foundation since it was made upon reading Tolkien’s The Fall of Arthur (now recently published), a long alliterative poem that adapts the meter of Old English verse to the modern English language. So impressed was Chambers that he exhorted Tolkien to complete the work. Unfortunately, despite the praise of Chambers and the success that Tolkien achieved in adapting alliterative meter to the modern language, the work remained unfinished. Nevertheless, Tolkien’s work represents a milestone in a twentieth-century revival of Old English meter that was later built on by poets such as Seamus Heaney and W. H. Auden. To evaluate Tolkien’s success in this endeavor requires a thorough metrical analysis of his work and an understanding of the tradition from which it emerged. Despite being neither the only nor the longest composition by Tolkien in Old English meter, The Fall of Arthur is the ideal subject for such an analysis as, through its Arthurian subject matter, it constitutes a continuation of a medieval alliterative tradition. Alliterative Old English verse finds its roots in a common Germanic oral tradition existing early in the migration period. With the subsequent divergence of Germanic peoples, this tradition diverged also, resulting in the related, though distinct, alliterative meters belonging to Old Norse, Old English, and Continental Germanic languages. Perhaps the oldest written example of specifically Old English verse is to be found in the engravings on the Franks Casket, a small chest of whalebone dating to the early seventh century. Most, however, of the Old English verse surviving today is preserved in four manuscripts, all of which were made in the 10th century. The dates of composition of these poems are, however, far more broadly spread than the age of their manuscripts might suggest, and there survive early preclassical poems such as Widsith, classical poems of which Beowulf is by far the best known, and late poems such as Durham, with each period displaying its own characteristic features within the larger [End Page 71] field of Old English meter.1 Despite variations in the meter between these periods, the most distinguishing features remained constant, and it can be generally said of Old English verse that it displays a long line that is divided into two half-lines by a strong caesura and that these two halves are linked to each other by the alliteration of stressed elements. This is only a very simplistic description of the meter, and theories regarding the correct way to scan Old English verse have been many and various; but the most generally accepted method of scanning Old English meter remains that of Eduard Sievers. Sievers proposed that all half-lines could be described as one of five verse types, which are as follows, with Old English examples from Beowulf and modern English examples by Tolkien from “On Translating Beowulf ” (M&C 62). All stress marks are my own: (As can be seen in the preceding example, a dip may consist of more than one unstressed syllable.) [End Page 72] The first lift of each half-line is generally obliged to participate in alliteration, and the second lift of the a-verse may participate while the second lift of the b-verse may not. Tolkien, then, favored the scansion of Old English verse according to Sievers’s five types, as can be seen from the preceding quoted examples, and consequently applied this system to his creation of modern English verse in the alliterative meter. It therefore seems logical also to apply the system to our analysis of The Fall of Arthur. Any detailed study of the meter of The Fall of Arthur requires first an awareness of post-Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse in order to place the work in context. There have been two major periods of alliterative revival in the past millennium. The first of these is the postconquest revival, and the second is...

Translating Troy: Provincial Politics in Alliterative Romance by Alex Mueller (review)

Reviewed by: Translating Troy: Provincial Politics in Alliterative Romance by Alex Mueller Kevin J. Harty Mueller, Alex, Translating Troy: Provincial Politics in Alliterative Romance (Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture), Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 2013; cloth; pp. 253; R.R.P. US$69.95; ISBN 9780814212219. This original, well-written, and well-argued study is the latest to challenge the monolithic view – popular when I was in graduate studies in the 1970s – of the so-called ‘Middle English Alliterative Revival’. Alex Mueller first grounds his study, which is as much political as it is literary, in a thoughtful and original rereading of Guido delle Colonne’s Historia Destructionis Troiae, which he argues is the foundational text for an alternate reading of the import of Troy and its fall to medieval England’s image of itself. While for Chaucer and his courtly contemporaries, the fall of Troy established the foundation for their own civilisation – England was the New Troy – the alliterative writers expressed marked scepticism about such received wisdom, and resisted any linear view of history that saw their country’s direct descent from fallen Troy and its glorious successor, imperial Rome, as something in which to glory. If anything, the alliterative writers, taking their cue from Guido, offered a provincial critique of the wisdom behind such courtly claims to an imperial legacy for England. Medieval England knew Guido’s text through the alliterative Destruction of Troy, which would, in turn, prove the source for the ways in which the authors of other alliterative poems would read the destruction of Troy; that reading finds not a glorious genealogy upon which to expand but a moral lesson warning against usurpation, siege, and broken vows. Mueller applies this general reconsideration of the glory that was not Troy to specific poems that reflect the generic possibilities embraced by English alliterative romance: John Clerk’s Destruction of Troy, The Siege of Jerusalem, the alliterative Morte Arthure, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Clerk, positioning himself as an authority intent upon telling the whole story of the fall of Troy, challenges his readers, initially predisposed as they are to revel in the alleged glories of their Trojan ancestry, to question the true value of such a chequered legacy. The Siege of Jerusalem advances the Trojan narrative to its incorporation as the founding myth of the Roman Empire. [End Page 340] Building upon the accepted critique of the poem for its anti-Semitism, Mueller also argues that the notable examples of anti-Semitism within the poem show the poet’s disgust with the cruelty of Rome, and elicit sympathy for the plight of the Jews under the harsh rule of their imperial conquerors. The alliterative Morte Arthure establishes King Arthur as the continuation of the so-called glory that was Rome. But the portrait that the poet offers of Arthur is complex. Juxtaposing signs of empire with scenes of cruelty, the poet sees in Arthur’s rise further evidence of the inseparability of imperial authority and the death of the innocent. Mueller concludes his examination of alliterative texts by focusing on the Trojan frame in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The central Arthurian tale of the testing of Camelot, Mueller argues, is ultimately disconnected from that frame and obscures the images of death, destruction, and conquest that the frame summons up. In sum, Mueller argues that the provincial alliterative romances offer a markedly different and totally pessimistic view of England’s Trojan legacy. That view stands in sharp contrast to, say, that of Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde, which is indifferent to Trojan history because it is more concerned with courtly love than with military history. Just as the alliterative poets asked their readers to re-engage with their concept of the role Troy played in their history, so Mueller asks us similarly to re-engage with our expected assumptions about the poems that he discusses. In doing so, Mueller has given us an important study that should go a long way toward encouraging further studies and reassessments of these always challenging (in several senses of the word) literary texts. Kevin J. Harty La Salle University Copyright © 2015 Kevin J. Harty

Randy P. Schiff Revivalist Fantasy: Alliterative Verse and Nationalist Literary HistoryRevivalist Fantasy: Alliterative Verse and Nationalist Literary History. Randy P. Schiff. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011. Pp. ix+276.

<i>Randy P. Schiff</i> Revivalist Fantasy: Alliterative Verse and Nationalist Literary History<i>Revivalist Fantasy: Alliterative Verse and Nationalist Literary History</i>. Randy P. Schiff. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011. Pp. ix+276.

Victorian Religious Revivals: Culture and Piety in Local and Global Contexts. By David Bebbington

As an undergraduate approaching finals I found mildly hysterical entertainment in identifying questions on previous exam papers that I would have been wholly incapable of answering. One such was posed on the Medieval literature paper and read, ‘Was there an alliterative revival, and if so when and where?’. Were I an ecclesiastical history student today, reading David Bebbington’s most recent book would provide me with some interesting evidence and theories for answering the question, ‘Was there such a thing as Victorian revivalism, and if so what were its distinguishing features?’ By studying the local conditions of seven revivals that took place between 1841 and 1880, three in Britain, three in North America, and one in Australia, Bebbington sets out to provide a taxonomy within which it is possible to provide meaningful global comparisons of these outbursts of religious enthusiasm within the world of Evangelical Protestantism. Deliberately eschewing the well-trodden territory of the1857–58 UK revival, or the carefully orchestrated work of those renowned revivalists, Moody and Sankey, Bebbington’s selection is determined by the requirement that the individual revivals had left adequate contemporary documentation, and the desire to achieve a spread both as between old and new settlements, and across ‘the bodies most affected by revival during the middle years of the century, the Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists’ (p.18).

Revivalist Fantasy: Alliterative Verse and Nationalist Literary History (review)

Reviewed by: Revivalist Fantasy: Alliterative Verse and Nationalist Literary History Mary Kate Hurley Randy P. Schiff , Revivalist Fantasy: Alliterative Verse and Nationalist Literary History. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011. Pp. 276. ISBN: 978-0-8142-1152-6. $47.95 In Revivalist Fantasy: Alliterative Verse and Nationalist Literary History, Randy P. Schiff argues that the 'Alliterative Revival'—what scholars traditionally argue is a re-emergence of the Old English alliterative style of verse in the fourteenth century—is a 'medievalist rather than medieval phenomenon' (2). Schiff balances his analysis between the alliterative poems he examines and the Alliterative Revivalists who interpret them, tracing both the critical history of the form and its (possibly obfuscatory) effects on the interpretation of the texts at its center. For Schiff, scholars in Alliterative Revivalism adhere to a literary historical narrative of a prosodic last stand of a northern, neo-Saxon, nostalgic alliterative verse form against a southern, Francophilic, rhyming, 'Chaucerian' poetic style. In Revivalist analyses, this Chaucerian style ultimately succeeded in blending monolithically understood 'English' and 'French' literary sensibilities. Such a view of alliterative verse, according to Schiff, constitutes a powerful but fictive critical frame that 'depends upon the barbarization of Saxon identity, whose backwardness is used to highlight the English ascent to a racially hybrid modernity' (5). In organizing his work, Schiff eschews the totalizing narratives that he argues characterize other accounts of alliterative poetry. The introduction and first chapter lay out the stakes of the argument, defining Alliterative Revivalism and tracing its roots in nineteenth-century nationalist discourses as well as its continued effects on modern literary analysis of alliterative poetry. The four remaining chapters examine the specific results of Alliterative Revivalism in the historical reception of particular texts while consciously avoiding a reliance on a single explanatory model of poetic form as he provides his own alternative readings. Schiff carefully outlines the methods by which a 'Revivalist insistence on a unifying aesthetics distracts from poets' contemporary concerns, redirecting attention either to a Saxon past or the fantasy of an organized, national movement' (35). His analysis of texts lays bare the resulting impoverishment of our modern understanding of alliterative poetry. Schiff 's argument demonstrates an impressive breadth of theoretical knowledge, supplementing his careful historicization of the poetry with a range of frames that might help scholars reassess alliterative verse, including transnationalism, sovereignty, gender, postcolonialism, and media theory. Each chapter of Revivalist Fantasy engages both Alliterative Revivalism and the other possible readings that it obscures. In his analysis of Guillaume de Palerne and its English translation (chapter two), Schiff examines the Revivalist emphasis on the equation of language and ethnicity. Situating the text in its historical milieu of increased socio-economic mobility, Schiff argues that rather than a simple dissemination of a 'French' narrative of animal transformations in an English literary translation, William of Palerne participates in a 'Western consolidation' that links the English and French texts in a shared project of reinforcing the boundary that marked off the elite from the lower classes (71). In the case of Sir Gawain and the Green [End Page 99] Knight (chapter three), the martial emphasis of Alliterative Revivalism 'conflat[es] Morgan and the Lady [Bertilak]' as doubles and as a result 'foregrounds male-male conflict' (78). Schiff 's corrective reading situates Morgan as a regional overlord figure who provokes the Arthurian court in an attempt to consolidate her own power. Rather than figuring as a typical Loathly Lady, then, Morgan 'seeks to drive away the knight, asserting sole control over her domestic space' (95). Schiff 's study of three other Arthurian texts, the Awntyrs off Arthure, Golagros and Gawane, and the Alliterative Morte Arthure (chapter four), demonstrates the transnational competition for dominance unearthed when Revivalism's emphasis on a proto-modern nation is relinquished in favor of a careful reading of the operations of imperial impulses in the texts. Finally, he argues that the 'center-periphery logic' of Revivalism ignores the 'simultaneously rural and metropolitan culture' that produced the Piers Plowman tradition (134, chapter five). Schiff suggests that the Langlandian works participate in 'recursive' analysis (a term drawn from N. Katherine Hayles), demonstrating 'self-reflexive treatment of material textuality' by engaging with writing technologies available...

Alliterative logic: A theory for postnormal times

This commentary responds to some of the issues raised in Zia Sardar's paper “Welcome to Postnormal Times” noting and attempting to explain points of difference and similarity. From Sardar's invocation of the 3C's of complexity, chaos and contradiction emerges the idea that our postnormal times might be likened to the strange times following the Great Plague that gave rise to the Alliterative Revival. Speculating further, it is questioned whether, in such strange times, utopian futures studies substitute for prayer.

The Destruction of Troy’s Different Rules: The Alliterative Revival and the Alliterative Tradition

The Destruction of Troy’s Different Rules: The Alliterative Revival and the Alliterative Tradition

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Second-Rate Stories? Changing Approaches to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Second-Rate Stories? Changing Approaches to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle